From Here to Timbuktu:A Threat to a World Heritage SiteJessica Achberger

Sankore Mosque, Timbuktu

The great underwater metropolis of Atlantis. The lost city of El Dorado. The mystical valley of Shangri-La. The sand swept city of Timbuktu. While the first three sites are only fantasies, Timbuktu is a very real, and very important, historical site.It is also a historical site that is in great danger, as radical Islamists, known as Ansar Dine, have taken over the small city in Mali, threatening destruction to monuments, religious sites, and priceless documents.NPR’s Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reports that the Ansar Dine has already destroyed a number of sites, including the entrance to the 15th century Sidia Yahya mosque. The door to this sacred site, Sufis believe, must always remain closed. These attacks on religious sites deemed to be offensive to Islamic jihadists are similar to those carried out on the Buddhist statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan in 2001. A World Heritage site since 1988, the United Nations Security Council has condemned the destruction of sites at Timbuktu, stating that the actions committed by Ansar Dine could constitute war crimes and be tried in the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

From Here to Timbuktu

Sign to Timbuktu in Morrocco

Timbuktu, located just south of the Sahara Desert and just north of the River Niger, has an almost mythical history shrouded in a veil of legend and lore. The city has come to represent a very distant place in one’s imagination, inspiring the phrase, “from here to Timbuktu” as well as references throughout literature for the past one-hundred and fifty years. This fantastical history is appropriate for this “city of 333 saints” as it is the location of many major sacred Sufi sites. Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, greatly influenced Islamic thought, particularly its literature. Sufi writers, like Rumi and Al-Ghazali, were instrumental in the spread of Islam.

Founded in the 5th century by Tuareg Imashagan, Timbuktu owes its rise to its unique geographical location. It was a major trading post for goods traveling from West to North Africa. The trade in salt, books, and gold, by both African and Arab traders, led to the city’s economic rise as well as the creation of an important cultural exchange. Perhaps the greatest historical significance of Timbuktu lies in its centrality to Islamic learning from the 13th to the 17th centuries, during the Mali Empire (1230-1600) and particularly Askia Mohammad I’s (1443-1558) rule. Timbuktu’s famous madrasas, including Koranic Sankore University, had some 25,000 students at their peak, where students and scholars studied religion and the arts and sciences.While current news reports have focused on the destruction of tombs and mosques (of greater significance to Sufis), for historians, much of the city’s real historical value lies in its collections of 700,000 manuscripts. Many of Timbuktu’s manuscripts copies made by scholars, but many others are originals, already at risk from poor preservation methods and now at an even greater risk from the Ansar Dine.

Timbuktu TodayMali, a poor and landlocked Africa nation, is one of the few democracies in the Islamic world. In March 2012, military officers seized power from President Amadou Toumani Touré, weeks before scheduled elections. Arms from Libya have exacerbated the tensions here and the West has been slow to respond. Previously, western aid supported the governing elite of Mali, and, in turn, the levels of corruption rose. In the north of Mali, Salafi Muslims, who were pushed from Algeria after the civil war in 2002, have begun calling themselves the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. This has led to the kidnapping of Europeans and drug trafficking, making northern Mali an important point in the drug trade from Latin America to Europe and the Middle East. The collapse of Qaddafi’s government in Libya had important consequences for Timbuktu. Members of the Tuareg ethnic group returned to Mali from Libya, carrying with them weapons from Qaddafi’s arsenal.Some joined the radical National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (M.N.L.A.), a secular separatist group that claimed independence for the northern region of Azawad. However, after no international support for the secession, the northern power vacuum led to the rise of the Islamists, who now effectively control the northern region.

Pictured here is Abdel Kader Haidara, one of Timbuktu’s leading manuscripts experts and son of a deceased renown local scholar, Mama Haïdara. In front of Haïdara in a glass case is a Koran, with, on the lower part of the image, a note indicating that several kings of Morocco owned it. The writing is typically Moroccan 12th century, Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Astronomy manuscripts, Timbuktu, Wikipedia

Mali now has a looming humanitarian disaster on its hands – an increasing number of displaced people and economic stagnation. Yet the Malian government has done nothing.

Benjamin F. Soares, a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden and an expert on Islam in Africa, argues that the international community must step in and that “A United Nations mandate allowing regional organizations like ECOWAS and the African Union to send an armed stabilization force and peacekeepers could stop the situation from deteriorating further.”